A Life Update

On Ending and Beginning

In 2020, I left Melbourne for San Francisco — right in the middle of COVID, a US presidential election, and fires that turned the California sky an unnatural shade of orange. The world felt like it was holding its breath.

I arrived anyway.

What followed was one of the most formative chapters of my life. And now, one of those chapters has closed. After years of building, teaching, and growing with the team and community at Open — I’ve decided to move on.

I leave with a lot of gratitude. For the team. For the students most of all. You taught me more than I’ll ever be able to say.

The Murkier Part

The last twelve months have been a spiritual practice of sorts.

Walking away from something you love. Something your identity has been quietly wrapped around for years, is not a tidy process. There’s no clean narrative. No triumphant pivot. Just this weird murky middle. The place between who you were and who you’re becoming, where the floor is soft and the walls aren’t quite visible yet.

It’s been hard to pretend otherwise.

Somewhere in that murk, something started to shift. All those years of practice. All those hours on the cushion. Perhaps some karma beginning to ripen.

I’m starting; slowly, imperfectly, to believe that I am not my work. That my worth isn’t located in what I’ve built or what I build next. That what are you working on? and who are you? are not the same question.

I’ve said this to students for a long time.

I’m just finally starting to mean it for myself.

So What Is Next?

Everyone keeps asking.

My honest, slightly annoying answer: I don’t know.

I’ve spent most of my career thinking five steps ahead. Planning. Building. Projecting. This time I made a deliberate choice not to. To actually live the thing I’ve been teaching — which is harder than it sounds when you’ve spent years being productive about presence.

But underneath the “I don’t know,” there is something more specific.

We’re at a strange moment. People are waking up, drinking their iced matchas, going to their $35 pulates classes and brunches — all while the world runs on algorithms, wars hold a low constant hum of anxiety, and AI quietly rearranges what it means to be alive. The institutions that used to hold our deepest questions; religion, community, ritual, have either collapsed or been replaced by something worse.

The wellness industry took those questions and repackaged them as productivity. Sold them back in apps, $3,000 retreats, push notifications reminding you to be here now.

The existential angst is real.

A whole generation of genuinely curious, culturally alive people got left holding the receipt. Hungry for something real, with nowhere credible and relevant to go.

That gap. That’s where I’m building.

A space where contemplative practice and contemporary culture don’t just coexist — but need each other. Where practice isn’t separate from love, from making, from loss, from the full mess of being alive. Where you don’t have to choose between depth and culture. Between stillness and being fully in the world. Where the ugly and the beautiful are sometimes the same thing.

This isn’t wellness. It isn’t religion. It’s something older and more necessary than both.

And honestly? Building it feels less like a launch and more like an admission. That I can’t not do this. That the gap I’ve been describing to others for years is the same one I’ve been standing in myself.

That something has a name now: gentle—noise.

A place for people who are done being optimized. Who want to practice without performing. Who sense that the contemplative and the contemporary belong in the same room. talking, questioning, sitting with what’s hard.

It’s early. It’s alive.

More to share soon.

But for now, I hope you will join along me for the ride.

Manoj.